Weekend Must Read #9: She is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick

Jess / 2017-09-29

The feeling that coincidences give us tells us they mean something… But what? What do they mean?

LAURETH PEAK’S father has taught her to look for recurring events, patterns, and numbers – a skill at which she’s remarkably talented. When he goes missing while researching coincidence for a new book, Laureth and her younger brother fly from London to New York and must unravel a series of cryptic messages to find him. The complication: Laureth is blind. Reliant on her other senses and on her brother to survive, Laureth finds that rescuing her father will take all her skill at spotting the extraordinary, and sometimes dangerous, connections in a world full of darkness.

Whoa. This was a wild ride. I really loved this novel. The characters were so incredibly cool and the plot was twists and turns galore. This was a super fast read for me. It was interesting and compelling!

I liked that thrown into the mix were pages of working notes that their author father was using to research his novel on coincidence. I felt like I was enjoying a fictional brother/sister duo solve a mystery, but also being educated on works of people like Einstein, Jung and Poe. This was such a cool book.

I liked how while Laureth is visually impaired, it is not her only defining characteristic. You were not told right away, though you could deduce it as it went along. I really enjoyed when she said: “(…) why it is that in books and films and comics there are only two kinds of blind people. There are the pathetic helpless figures of woe, only in the plot probably because the writer thought it would be really heart-breaking to have a poor blind person not see something terrible happening right under their nose. Sometimes the author seems to go to great lengths to demonstrate that blindness is worse than death. (…) Either their sight is miraculously restored, hooray! Or they die. Well at least then they’re not blind anymore. (…) And then there are the superheroes. Like Daredevil.”

I loved how self aware this girl is. She knows that she is not helpless but does not have “enhanced senses” like fictional stories often depict people with her affliction. I enjoyed her perspective of the world and her first time in New York.

This was a wonderful book. But I am not surprised, considering the Sedgwick kick I have been on.